Memento Mori <- the reason I count down.

Novel 397 was Concrete Island, again by J. G. Ballard. The count-down continues.

Immediate points of comparison:

Woman in the Dunes

Robinson Crusoe

Empire of the Sun

Oh right, the third one is also by Ballard, so of course there are grounds for comparison. But what's intriguing is how their commonalities shine through all their obvious contrasts: how can a description of civilian detention centers in Shanghai during WWII be so thematically similar to a tale set in 1970s London? Concrete Island describes a man's ludicrous but meticulously contrived confinement on a wasteland 'island' hemmed in between newly constructed highways. Here, Ballard's prose reveals the same obsessive/self-destructive attachment to the place of confinement, in London as in Shanghai; vividly he describes the convoluted psychology that selects its own punishment, and stubbornly clings to it. You see a similar twisted obsession with one's bodily deterioration, and a mad yearning for death.

I believe that Ballard is in a sense repackaging the visceral insights of his wartime experience into a modern allegory.

The accident that throws him onto the island, the tribulations that obstruct his early attempts to escape, his ultimate fatalistic attachment to it, are first and last self-inflicted. On one level, they result from his indiscretion (driving too fast so that his car plummets onto the island in the first place), but on another, are a result of a wider culpability. This is a tragedy that oozes out of the modern life we have consented to living, the devices we have chosen to surrounded ourselves with, and the cold embrace of the city around us.

The novel ends on an eerie note, but therein perhaps we can draw some amount of comfort; all of this before our eyes is as fleeting as a dream on a spring night, teetering on the edge of collapse, and even in the most advanced city in the world the jungle is never far away. Perhaps it is only in the state of nature that we can clearly see what is truly necessary, and what is truly valuable.